Apple Silicon, Apple Arcade, and the potential for an Apple Gaming Platform

[Malus120]

(TL : DR With Apple Silicon, Apple now has the pieces in place to deliver a gaming platform on which AAA games could be deployed and played both at home and on the go, seamlessly. Apple Arcade could be transformed into a GamePass like first step)(Sorry for the essay, I was bored and this has been on my mind for a while)

Anyone who’s been a Mac user and a gamer for any amount of time knows Apple has always been a figurative absentee parent to Mac gaming, occasionally showing fleeting interest in it, only to then ignore it for years at a time.

The last few years in particular, have seen Mac gaming moving in an increasingly bleak direction, with Apple’s abandonment of OpenGL (and eventual replacement with Metal), the transition to Vulkan/DirectX 12 on the PC, and the announcement of the move to Apple Silicon all contributing to the virtual abandonment of AAA ports to macOS.

As bad as things are on the surface however, I think a potential silver lining still exists.
For the first time in a long time, I feel like Apple is positioned to have both the capability and the business incentive to place much greater emphasis on game development across its ecosystem.

Over the last few years, Apple has increasingly, if inconsistently, demonstrated that it recognizes the importance of gaming to the iOS ecosystem, and the unique ability of games to demonstrate Apple’s substantial performance leadership in the mobile space. I think Apple Arcade, introduced in 2019, best demonstrates Apple’s flirtation with greater involvement in the space (although like most Apple gaming projects, it too, sees infrequent attention.)
On the Mac side however, Apple’s commitment to minimalist designs with anemic GPUs, the sorry state of the Mac Pro, and Intel’s inability to deliver on the integrated graphics that powered most Macs sold meant developers wrote off the Mac as a platform because the number of Macs that could run AAA titles was limited (and those that cared could use Boot Camp) and Apple wrote off gaming because they saw it as an insignificant driver of Mac sales.

With the transition to Apple Silicon however, the Mac has undergone a paradigm shift that could finally break that cycle. For the first time in Apple’s (recent) history even the lowliest of (Apple Silicon) Macs combine a fast CPU with a modern GPU more than capable of running the latest AAA titles.

Apple now has the pieces in place to deliver a gaming experience that runs the gamut from portable to AAA. In fact, they are perhaps the only company aside from Nintendo possessing a platform on which AAA games could be deployed to millions of users and played both at home and on the go, seamlessly.

If Apple chose to go all in, Apple Arcade could be repurposed into a more “serious” gaming service, along the lines of GamePass to help encourage developers to bring games to the Apple ecosystem.

Do I think this will happen? I’d like to hope so but... It would require a significant investment in improving the underlying APIs and wooing developers. Apple would also need to find a way to salvage its relationship with Epic. And of course, Apple’s corporate culture has traditionally seen gaming as “outside of its core business” at best.
Still, it’s fun to think about, and maybe we’ll get something at WWDC (maybe not THIS WWDC… but someday… maybe)

(Just to be clear this post is more along the lines of something interesting Apple COULD do than what I necessarily think they will do)

 

[jav6454]

They have, but it's not their interest given their push into processors for media encoding and neural computing.

 

[Malus120]

And just like that, Apple actually delivered for Mac gamers at WWDC 2022! I'm honestly still kind of shocked that this actually happened (despite making this post.)
Metal 3, MetalFX (temporal) Upscaling (DLSS/FSR 2.0 equivalent), new fast resource loading API (DirectStorage equivalent), Resident Evil Village, and hints at a wider Apple gaming ecosystem. While Apple still has a lot to prove, the future of gaming on Apple platforms looks a lot brighter and more tangible than when I typed out this thread just a few hours ago.

 

[Kpjoslee]

Their APIs were never the problem, but they need to do much better than "hey look, we do have some AAA tiles on Mac as well!" approach when it comes to mac gaming.

 

[kaioshade]

Apple has a lot of good ideas for Mac gaming, but they never seem to go all the way. Just like how iPad apps were supposed to be seamless with M1 MacBooks.

 

[Malus120]

Their APIs were never the problem, but they need to do much better than "hey look, we do have some AAA tiles on Mac as well!" approach when it comes to mac gaming.

You'll get no disagreement from me on that point.
That said, Metal was falling dangerously far behind Vulkan/DX12 and the fact that Apple mentioned gaming directly in a dedicated section of the presentation, while introducing new, specifically gaming centric APIs, is IMHO, a really good start (emphasis on start, as we've both noted, follow through has been one of Apple's biggest problems with gaming in the past)

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Metal 3, MetalFX (temporal) Upscaling (DLSS/FSR 2.0 equivalent),

Where do you get the equivalent info? They said they’re going to use spacial upscaling and temporal anti-aliasing. All of this has been around for years, just not part of the API. How do you come to the conclusion that’s it’s equivalent to DLSS and FSR? It doesn’t say so anywhere.

new fast resource loading API (DirectStorage equivalent)

Again, where does that info come from? Fast resource loading has been around since the early 3D-shooter days, just not as part of graphic APIs.

Resident Evil Village

That is really the interesting part. I wonder if they got financial support to port it over or if it’s a direct result of the game doing so poorly in sales. It only sold just over 6 million copies, which is very disappointing. The reason can only be two things, either because it’s just not Resident Evil anymore and fans are jumping the ship or because it looks so piss-poor graphically compared to other modern titles. Or maybe both. I would certainly like to see a new “proper” Resident Evil game again.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Apple and AAA gaming are simply never going to be a thing

Apple doesn't care enough to do even remotely enough to appease developers, nor are they easy or fun to work with.

The Apple and gaming thing has been a topic literally forever
It's never going to happen

 

[GrumpyCoder]

I do wonder what, if anything, Metal 3 changes when it comes to resource binding tiers and if that might make porting DX12 titles easier. If Apple wants to make porting easier, they need to give us 1M+ descriptors and the full heap for CBVs, SRVs, UAVs and samplers per stage.

 

[venom600]

Where do you get the equivalent info? They said they’re going to use spacial upscaling and temporal anti-aliasing. All of this has been around for years, just not part of the API. How do you come to the conclusion that’s it’s equivalent to DLSS and FSR? It doesn’t say so anywhere.

Again, where does that info come from? Fast resource loading has been around since the early 3D-shooter days, just not as part of graphic APIs.

Everything they described sounds exactly like what FSR and DLSS do. It may use a slightly different method (like how DLSS uses AI and FSR doesn't) but it's the same effect; a game running at a lower resolution is upscaled to run at full screen resolution so that it looks 80-90% as good as the game would natively.

The fast resource loading is something that is very new because the tech to do it wasn't around until recently. Consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series S/X) were the first to have it. Even Windows just got it. All it means is that the PCI 4 SSD is fast enough to load assets directly into graphics memory. It's a game changer and what allows all those fancy tech demos of Unreal Engine 5 and PS5/Xbox games to run with virtually no load times.


The kicker is that the one showcase engine that really takes advantage of these features is Unreal Engine 5, but Apple's war with Epic means it isn't coming any time soon, and that means no games based on it.

 

[kiranmk2]

From the keynote today it looks like the base M2 has a power level inbetween the last generation base consoles and mid-cycle updates (e.g. M2 is in between PS4 and PS4 Pro).

XBox One S - 1.4 TFlops, 44 GTexels/s, 15 Gpixels/s
PS4 - 1.8 TFlops, 58 GTexels/s, 26 Gpixels/s
M1 - 2.6 TFlops, 82 GTexels/s, 41 Gpixels/s
M2 - 3.6 TFlops, 111 GTexels/s, 55 Gpixels/s
PS4 Pro - 4.2 TFlops, 131 GTexels/s, 29 Gpixels/s
XBox One X - 6.0 TFlops, 188 GTexels/s, 38 Gpixels/s

Given that next gen consoles still hasn't taken off (most games are still released on PS4 and PS5), this is the time for Apple to get into the gaming market and get more M1/M2 devices out in the next 12 months which would mean that every iPad, Mac and AppleTV sold had a GPU more powerful than a PS4 onboard.

 

[librarian]

Everything they described sounds exactly like what FSR and DLSS do. It may use a slightly different method (like how DLSS uses AI and FSR doesn't) but it's the same effect; a game running at a lower resolution is upscaled to run at full screen resolution so that it looks 80-90% as good as the game would natively.

The fast resource loading is something that is very new because the tech to do it wasn't around until recently. Consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series S/X) were the first to have it. Even Windows just got it. All it means is that the PCI 4 SSD is fast enough to load assets directly into graphics memory. It's a game changer and what allows all those fancy tech demos of Unreal Engine 5 and PS5/Xbox games to run with virtually no load times.


The kicker is that the one showcase engine that really takes advantage of these features is Unreal Engine 5, but Apple's war with Epic means it isn't coming any time soon, and that means no games based on it.

The problem right now is the hardware.
Both m1 and m2 are still dead on arrival for next gen games due to lack of hardware rt. All major studio already upgraded their inhouse engines to work with raytracing for their next releases, not to mention majority of commercial tools to create assets already rely on optix or dxr since 2019.
Hardware raytracing is not a gimmick, it speeds up dramatically some steps in the pipeline, mostly the lighting (no more gi baking, no need of lightmaps, no need of lightmap uvs).
On top of that Metal is still trash tier api for shader support. I'm not suprised if adobe or autodesk discontinue some of their products because of Metal.

 

[Malus120]

Everything they described sounds exactly like what FSR and DLSS do...

The fast resource loading is something that is very new because the tech to do it wasn't around until recently. Consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series S/X) were the first to have it. Even Windows just got it. All it means is that the PCI 4 SSD is fast enough to load assets directly into graphics memory. It's a game changer and what allows all those fancy tech demos of Unreal Engine 5 and PS5/Xbox games to run with virtually no load times.

Exactly what I was going to say. Anyone's who's been paying attention for the last few years knew exactly what Apple was talking about with those two APIs.

From the keynote today it looks like the base M2 has a power level inbetween the last generation base consoles and mid-cycle updates XBox Series S

XBox One S - 1.4 TFlops, 44 GTexels/s, 15 Gpixels/s
PS4 - 1.8 TFlops, 58 GTexels/s, 26 Gpixels/s
M1 - 2.6 TFlops, 82 GTexels/s, 41 Gpixels/s
M2 - 3.6 TFlops, 111 GTexels/s, 55 Gpixels/s
PS4 Pro - 4.2 TFlops, 131 GTexels/s, 29 Gpixels/s
XBox Series S - 4.01 TFlops

Given that next gen consoles still hasn't taken off (most games are still released on PS4 and PS5), this is the time for Apple to get into the gaming market and get more M1/M2 devices out in the next 12 months which would mean that every iPad, Mac and AppleTV sold had a GPU more powerful than a PS4 onboard.

As you may have noticed from my edits to your comment, it's actually even better than that. The XBox Series S will be supported for at least the next 5-7 years and the M2 GPU's theoretical performance is within ~10% of Xbox Series S (with all M1 Pro/Max variants being faster.) Furthermore, all Apple Silicon Macs including the OG M1 feature Performance Cores with far higher single threaded performance than the ~3.6Ghz Zen 2 cores in the next-gen consoles, meaning CPU performance should also for the most part not be a bottleneck.

The problem right now is the hardware.
Both m1 and m2 are still dead on arrival for next gen games due to lack of hardware rt. All major studio already upgraded their inhouse engines to work with raytracing for their next releases, not to mention majority of commercial tools to create assets already rely on optix or dxr since 2019.
Hardware raytracing is not a gimmick, it speeds up dramatically some steps in the pipeline, mostly the lighting (no more gi baking, no need of lightmaps, no need of lightmap uvs).
On top of that Metal is still trash tier api for shader support. I'm not surprised if adobe or Autodesk discontinue some of their products because of Metal.

Now you're just being silly. I have a PS5, 3070, and 6800XT. RT is indeed nice to have today, but will not become a requirement for the vast majority of games within the next 3+ years (the only one today is Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, which... you can just play the OG release without RT, on Mac no less.) For better or worse, given the PS5/XsX/XsS RT capabilities and the global chip shortage, rasterization paths will continue to be a thing for the vast majority of games going forward for the foreseeable future.
Does that mean Apple doesn't need to get serious about RT at some point in the next few years? Of course not. But given that the M2 is (most likely) based on the A15 it was unreasonable to expect hardware RT. It's very possible Apple is waiting for hardware RT to be viable on mobile before spending the engineering resources on it.

Right now Apple's most important task is getting back in the (high performance) game (so to speak,) and while ultra high end features like hardware RT will eventually be part of that conversation, there are 101 other things that will (and should) take priority for Apple's business development and engineering budget.

As for Metal... I think "trash tier" is unnecessary hyperbole but I'm not going to argue it doesn't need a lot of work. Let's hope Metal 3 is good.

 

[diamond.g]

The fast resource loading is something that is very new because the tech to do it wasn't around until recently. Consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series S/X) were the first to have it. Even Windows just got it. All it means is that the PCI 4 SSD is fast enough to load assets directly into graphics memory. It's a game changer and what allows all those fancy tech demos of Unreal Engine 5 and PS5/Xbox games to run with virtually no load times.


The kicker is that the one showcase engine that really takes advantage of these features is Unreal Engine 5, but Apple's war with Epic means it isn't coming any time soon, and that means no games based on it.

Just to be clear UE5 doesn't use Direct Storage on PC. Nanite and World Partition is really impressive.

 

[venom600]

The problem right now is the hardware.
Both m1 and m2 are still dead on arrival for next gen games due to lack of hardware rt.

Maybe in three or four years, but even then RT won't be a requirement because most people won't have a GPU capable of utilizing it for quite a while.

Just to be clear UE5 doesn't use Direct Storage on PC. Nanite and World Partition is really impressive.

You're right. That's why the incredible Matrix City demo wasn't available on Windows, iirc.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Everything they described sounds exactly like what FSR and DLSS do.

Huh, where? I’ve watched it twice now and all I heard were buzz-words without any technical detail. I might be so, but I’m looking for hard evidence. Either someone from Apple explained it, the documented it or they have sample projects that show it. I’ve seen nothing so far.

It may use a slightly different method (like how DLSS uses AI and FSR doesn't) but it's the same effect;

That’s like saying you can ride a cow to the moon, because it generates thrust when farting. Same thing with a rocket.

No the effects are not the same and can be very different. If it would be all the same, then why don‘t we still use the same upscaling algorithms Snell & Wilcox and Faroudja pioneered all those decades ago?
We’ve had upscaling and AA for decades, yet it’s not the same as DLSS.

a game running at a lower resolution is upscaled to run at full screen resolution so that it looks 80-90% as good as the game would natively.

I’m lost. All I’ve seen are crappy looking games that look like they’ve been released 5-10 years ago and we’re jumping to 80-90% as good as native? To be fair, the games don’t look any better on Windows or consoles. I wouldn’t jump there just yet. I will certainly use everything Apple is showing for image, video and 3D-graphic related work. If not in a full project, then certainly in a few quickly created tech demos.

The fast resource loading is something that is very new because the tech to do it wasn't around until recently.

You imply it’s the same as on PS or Windows, but is it? Again, I‘ve seen no confirmation about this except for a few journalists and members of the press jumping to conclusions without understanding anything of it. It might be the same, but I’m asking how do people know, where did Apple confirm that exact thing? We’ve had predictive data loading for fast resources for decades now, it’s not the same as what is on PS or Windows. So again, the question is what exactly is fast resource loading technically?

The kicker is that the one showcase engine that really takes advantage of these features is Unreal Engine 5, but Apple's war with Epic means it isn't coming any time soon, and that means no games based on it.

Huh? What exactly? I’ve used UE5 on macOS and while some things don’t work and maybe never will, the engine is useable. Or do you mean any specific Metal 3 features that are not in UE5? If so which and is there no way around these features?

 

[GrumpyCoder]

You're right. That's why the incredible Matrix City demo wasn't available on Windows, iirc.

Huh? You mean not available on Mac? Because it is available on Windows. The technology behind UE5 isn’t the reason for lack of Mac support for Matrix City. The demo is coded for a specific editor and engine version version. So even if UE5 on macOS would have all the features, it still wouldn’t run. I figured that much out when I disassembled the Matrix (see what I did there? ). One could probably get around this, but it would require a ton of fiddling around and fooling the editor/engine. The one thing they stripped IIRC is some artwork including characters.

 

[JMacHack]

Hi, you must be new! Let me reiterate the statements given by actual game developers in this forum:

“The Mac doesn’t have enough marketshare to justify the work to port games.”

This statement, though ignored by many individuals, is the core reason why the Mac will never be a good gaming platform.

I hope this has informed you enough that this topic won’t be brought up again!

 

[Malus120]

Huh, where? I’ve watched it twice now and all I heard were buzz-words without any technical detail. I might be so, but I’m looking for hard evidence. Either someone from Apple explained it, the documented it or they have sample projects that show it. I’ve seen nothing so far.

So here's the thing... We won't know for sure exactly how MetalFX stacks up until people who are not under pre WWDC access NDA have actually had some time with it.

That said, there is more than enough information in both the WWDC presentation itself, and more importantly on the MetalFX page of the Apple Developer documentation (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metalfx?language=objc) to reasonably conclude that it is supposed to be a "smart" upscaling technology that reconstructs a higher resolution output from a lower resolution internal image using either spatial upscaling (similar to FSR 1.0) or temporal antialiased upscaling (similar to FSR 2.0,) depending on the needs of the developer.
(As an aside, I'll also add that as a fluent Japanese speaker, the way Ijuin-san described the impact of MetalFX (in Japanese) in his (admittedly very theatrical) presentation strongly supports the above interpretation. )

You mention later in your post that "we've had upscaling and antialiasing for decades." which is true and also exactly why Apple wouldn't go through all the trouble of not only creating this, but branding it, giving it valuable time in their WWDC Keynote, and describing it using very similar language to FSR/DLSS, if that wasn't exactly what it was supposed to be. Apple's not going to waste valuable stage time describing things Metal could already do.
Whether or not it will actually be able to match or exceed FSR 2.0 (let alone DLSS) in terms of performance or image quality, of course remains to be seen by anyone not under NDA.

Perhaps I should have been more precise in my language when I initially described wrote out my reaction to WWDC (I literally just wrote what I thought.) What I meant by the word "equivalent," in reference to both MetalFX/FSR/DLSS and fast resource loading/DirectStorage was "this is clearly meant to be Apple's own take on/version of that kind of technology." Will it work in exactly the same way or achieve exactly the same results? Of course not, otherwise Apple would be guilty of intellectual property infringement.

Here is the developer page for the resource loading API (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/resource_loading?changes=latest_minor&language=objc)
What is described sounds very similar to the storage API Mark Cerny described during the PS5 reveal and what I have heard about DirectStorage from Microsoft. Again I don't think they would've given it Keynote time if it wasn't supposed to be exactly what it sounds like.

Anyway, if you're not convinced I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree until an actual product has been released but I think Apple's intentions here are pretty clear. That said I'm happy to entertain counter evidence if you'd like to present some in a constructive manner.

One final thing, let's try and keep this thread friendly. I'm a long time Mac gamer and I 100% understand the impulse to be cynical when it comes to Apple and gaming but why not let people have some hope. If Apple drops the ball it'll just be... the same story we've all heard before. But if they don't... we could be looking at some fun times ahead.

 

[venom600]

Huh, where? I’ve watched it twice now and all I heard were buzz-words without any technical detail. I might be so, but I’m looking for hard evidence. Either someone from Apple explained it, the documented it or they have sample projects that show it. I’ve seen nothing so far.

Are you seriously saying that it's a huge leap to believe that Apple implemented DSR/DLSS & DirectStorage-like APIs in 2022 when the rest of the modern game industry is doing the same thing? Do you really believe that they would spend the time talking about it in the presentation if it wasn't this sort of state of the art technology or something very similar?
It seems like your argument is that they didn't show technical details, so it can't possibly be what we think it is. And of course they didn't; that's what the documentation online and the sessions during the rest of the week are for.

And yes, I was dead wrong about UE5 on MacOS and the demo on Windows.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Anyway, if you're not convinced I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree until an actual product has been released but I think Apple's intentions here are pretty clear. That said I'm happy to entertain counter evidence if you'd like to present some in a constructive manner.

One final thing, let's try and keep this thread friendly. I'm a long time Mac gamer and I 100% understand the impulse to be cynical when it comes to Apple and gaming but why not let people have some hope. If Apple drops the ball it'll just be... the same story we've all heard before. But if they don't... we could be looking at some fun times ahead.

No worries. I believe things when I get absolute proof, the rest is wishes with the risk of getting hopes up and be disappointed. Been there too many times. I’ll see soon enough how this works when I try it myself and if it works like that, good for them.

I’ve been using Apple systems since the 80s with a little more Unix and DOS/Windows before Apple came back with a G3/G4, when I went all Apple again as daily drivers. I’ve played a ton on Macs as well in the past. When Apple went all 64-bit it became a little pointless for me. I don’t care what platform something is on I want, I just buy that platform and use it going back all the way to Nintendo, Sega, SNK with the Neo Geo, the PC Engine, 3DO, etc. I’m not brand loyal in that sense. If a game is on Mac and it’s performing similar to Windows, then I’m happy to play on a Mac. If it’s not or the performance is worse (hello Path of Exile), then I simply use Windows. Totally painless, just a push of a button.

Do you really believe that they would spend the time talking about it in the presentation if it wasn't this sort of state of the art technology or something very similar?

Because they haven’t done so in the past and disappointed? Apple used to be great with this stuff in the past, the early Intel days were fantastic. Go back to the Mac Studio event and see how they lied about all the performance claims they’ve made. Not that Apple is alone with this, but it’s boring watching all the claims and then being disappointed again. The latest thing is Tensorflow and PyTorch on AS and yet a simple old Nvidia 1080 runs circles around the M1 Ultra in TF and PyTorch when it comes to performance. 🤷‍♂️

 

[Irishman]

Apple and AAA gaming are simply never going to be a thing

Apple doesn't care enough to do even remotely enough to appease developers, nor are they easy or fun to work with.

The Apple and gaming thing has been a topic literally forever
It's never going to happen

Oh, I’m always open to hearing viewpoints from developers who have experience working with Apple, even if and when that experience is negative.

What happened in your case?

 

[Malus120]

No worries. I believe things when I get absolute proof, the rest is wishes with the risk of getting hopes up and be disappointed. Been there too many times. I’ll see soon enough how this works when I try it myself and if it works like that, good for them.

I can understand that point of view even if I disagree with you in this specific case. Apple has let Mac gamers/users down in the past. Waiting to pass judgement until you actually have something in your hands isn't a bad way to approach technology.

I don’t care what platform something is on I want, I just buy that platform and use it going back all the way to Nintendo, Sega, SNK with the Neo Geo, the PC Engine, 3DO, etc. I’m not brand loyal in that sense. If a game is on Mac and it’s performing similar to Windows, then I’m happy to play on a Mac.

Agreed. As someone who grew up in the 90s during the heart of the "OG" console and Mac vs PC "wars," I now have very little patience for people carrying water for these companies. The majority of my gaming takes place on my PS5 these days, not because I love Sony, but because it's the most convenient for me. I also use GamePass on PC. The last game I played on my Mac was... I honestly don't know. Assuming the port of RE Village is good, I'll buy it on Mac despite already owning it on PS5, so I can enjoy it on the go.
While I am excited about the future of the Mac given what was shown at WWDC, I would of course encourage everyone to game wherever is most convenient for them and always be open to considering other/better options.

 

[Janichsan]

New year, same discussion. How often have we seen the unevitable surge of Mac gaming now?

It's always the same: Apple showcases some hot new cooperation with a AAA game developer (be it EA, Epic, or Capcom), the initiative quickly fizzles out, rinse, repeat.

The related news that Macs are only now finally capable of running No Man's Sky, six years after its original release, and after it has been ported to every other current gaming platform, including the technically fairly weak Nintendo Switch, just underlines how far behind Apple is behind when it comes to gaming.

That is really the interesting part. I wonder if they got financial support to port it over or if it’s a direct result of the game doing so poorly in sales. It only sold just over 6 million copies, which is very disappointing.

Er, what?

RE 8 is already one of Capcom's 10 bestselling games and has at this time (about a year after release) sold more copies than RE 5, RE 6, RE 7, and the remakes of RE 2 and RE 3 in the same period.

 

[JMacHack]

Oh, I’m always open to hearing viewpoints from developers who have experience working with Apple, even if and when that experience is negative.

iirc, Grumpycoder, Ethosik, and XWhiplash all have made statements on this issue.